Book Review: The Trouble With Being Born, by Emil Cioran
The most pointless book I have ever read
The Trouble With Being Born is not a normal book. A normal book, whether fiction or nonfiction, makes some attempt at a coherent narrative. The sentences will form into paragraphs, and the paragraphs into chapters, and the chapters will advance a plot or build an argument. A normal book have something at least resembling a through-line which ties together all of the ideas contained within. A normal book at least makes some attempt at continuity and cohesion.
The Trouble With Being Born is not a normal book. Rather, it is 12 chapters and 211 pages’ worth of paragraphs and aphorisms, with only the loosest of possible thematic connections tying the disparate thoughts together. There is no plot or argument being built. Any attempt to discern some organizational method or schema in the arrangement of chapters will lead to weeping and gnashing of teeth. Over the course of these 12 chapters, Emil Cioran is not advancing an idea or building a case, but rather is taking us on a beautiful, gloomy, meandering, and often very funny tour of the darkest parts of his mind and his experience of the world.
Previous commentators have tried to pick out themes explored in this book: failure, suicide, history, God, futility, etc. These topics are treated in the book, to be sure. But I take issue with the notion that The Trouble With Being Born has themes at all. To me, a theme is something that is explored and developed, a topic that the author tries to understand and about which he tries to communicate some “message.” Cioran involves himself with no such vanities. No thought or subject gets developed beyond a paragraph. There is no pretense that at the end of the book you will have a better understanding of the topics explored than you had at the beginning. No, you will read Mr. Cioran’s comments on the subject, whatever that may be, and then you will read his next aphorism, and so on and so forth until you decide to put the book down and wonder what, if anything, was the point.
Rather than themes, Cioran has a more a series of devices that he deploys to devastating effect. His favorite trick is to find the masks we all keep in place for the smooth functioning of society, and then to mercilessly rip off those masks and poke and prod at what’s underneath. He is a ruthless, pitiless writer, but he is no more lenient with himself than he is with us, so perhaps he can be forgiven this. His introspection is as brutal as his external observations, and this is what makes him such an effective critic. He has no vested interests, no carefully curated self-image to preserve, no claims to any sort of moral superiority - all of which allows him to make the most incisive, biting analyses without alienating his audience. He can come down and roll around in the mud of the world, and from that vantage point he can say something like “Look, I’m down here with you guys, and let me tell you, it is really filthy here.”
If there is a message to this book, it is communicated in the disjointed, aphoristic style in which it is written. Cioran is very aware of the profound futility of any projects or aspirations, whether they be aesthetic, intellectual, or moral. He agrees with the author of Ecclesiastes: vanity of vanities, all is vanity. That’s why he makes no attempt to create a system of thought. He doesn’t even think it’s worth his while to explore a thought for more than a few sentences. God doesn’t read; why should we address his creation as if he did? Stop trying to conjure up these grandiose, bloated propositions and insights. Thinking and writing are at best coping mechanisms for the weight of existence; it’s foolish to try to make them more than that. In Cioran’s own words:
What is the point of what we say? Is there any meaning to this series of propositions which constitutes our talk? And do these propositions, taken one by one, have any object? We can talk only if we set aside this question, or if we raise it as infrequently as possible.
I would say that more than any message, this book is distinguished by its mood. Were I to try to capture this mood in a single word, I would choose “bleak.” Not fatalistic, not nihilistic, not even pessimistic. If Cioran were any of those things, he would not have written a book. No, his writing is bleak. The word ‘bleak’ has a certain aesthetic quality to it that captures the essence of this book in a way that words like “pessimistic,” “fatalistic,” “nihilistic,” etc. simply do not convey. There is a certain beauty to bleakness, a certain comfort. If you have ever driven through South Dakota or central California, you will understand what I mean. Cioran’s willingness to look directly at the bareness and darkness of his experience of life without flinching makes for very cathartic and therapeutic reading.
And this is where I think most of Cioran’s readers and critics misunderstand his thinking. Most often he is characterized as a nihilist. Comparisons to Nietzsche are very common, and I that there is at least some degree of truth in this. However, I notice a distinct difference in tone between Cioran and true nihilists like Nietzsche or Schopenhauer. It’s true that Cioran, like other nihilists, rejects all of the conventional sources of meaning - religion, pleasure, wisdom, procreation, striving for greatness - that philosophers have turned to in ages past. But most nihilists, Nietzsche foremost among them, write with an almost painfully sincere tone that does not burden The Trouble With Being Born. Although occasionally indulging in some melancholic wallowing, Cioran largely avoids this trap of unrestrained earnestness. Nietzsche seems to be very sincerely distressed by the impoverishment of meaning; Cioran doesn’t seem to be all that invested in meaning in the first place. Rather than the impassioned, grandiose German Romantic prose employed by Nietzsche, Cioran writes with a cool, ironic detachment, an attitude much better captured by Miles Davis than by Wagner.
The Trouble With Being Born seems to tell us that if the conventional sources of meaning can’t do the trick, then perhaps we need to expand our idea of just what a meaningful life can look like. Perhaps things like failure, ambiguity, dejection, uncertainty, boredom, and even death itself can imbue life with a fresh and unlooked-for meaning, one which is much more resilient to the onslaughts of societal and psychological decay. And if these fail too, is that really such a big deal? We’re here, aren’t we? Whereas Schopenhauer comes down decisively against existence - and Cioran certainly laments existence and sees the argument against it - he doesn’t quite go all the way to repudiating and condemning his birth. Life, although painful and perhaps meaningless, is rather cosmically funny. Our birth may be an unwelcome interruption from eternal slumber, but now that we’ve been awoken, we must accept this fact and go about our slow journey back into the nothingness from which we came, and this doesn’t turn out to be such an impossible task. It is certainly much more manageable than a single day of existence.
If The Trouble With Being Born has a fault, it is that it sometimes tends to luxuriate in its own gloom a little too much, and in these moments it is almost unbearably cringe. Consider the following aphorism from the book:
“What misery a sensation is! Ecstasy itself, perhaps, is nothing more.”
Very teenage emo indeed! This reads like the edgy diary of someone with black lipstick and a Jack Skellington tattoo. But on the whole this industrial-grade cringe is in the minority. Cioran, although plumbing the depths (or heights) of despair, seems to do so with a smirk on his face. And really, I feel that we cannot expect anything else from a brooding unemployed Romanian insomniac who spent his life ruminating on failure and decay. If he causes us to cringe, Cioran more than makes it up to us with his knack for inducing some truly brutal self-examination.
What else can I say about this book? It is sometimes pretentious and grandiose, but these moments are always accompanied with a strong sense of irony that ultimately reinforces the mood. You may not learn anything from The Trouble With Being Born, but that isn’t really the point. It’s much better to read this as poetry of the wandering mind, and once you’ve relieved yourself of the task of trying to find the point, you can simply enjoy the writing. You read this book not to increase your knowledge or understanding of the world; you read it to experience, as much as an outsider possibly can, the inner experience of the mind and soul of a singularly perceptive and disabused man. In Cioran’s writing is perfected the art of the flawlessly crafted sentence, the musings of a grim soul set in the most poetic prose you might ever read.
In closing, I want to say that I do recommend this book. It is strange, often caustic, but it is also unceasingly elegant and eminently well written. Once I came to a friend of mine bemoaning my perpetual problem of buying books that I might never get around to reading. This friend responded with some very wise words: “Never stop buying books, even if you think you might not read them. Some rainy day, you’ll be stuck inside looking for the perfect book to spend time with. And you’ll pick up that book you thought you would never read, and it will be the perfect friend for you on that rainy afternoon.” The Trouble With Being Born is certainly an unexpected friend on a rainy day, not the one you would go to for reassurance or encouragement or exultation. But it is a friend nonetheless, one who will understand your sorrows, one who won’t ask too much - you can pick up the book, read one paragraph, and then set it down and take a nap - in short, a friend who will commiserate with you and make you feel that you aren’t quite alone in your dreary experience of the world.